Wednesday, 11 February 2015

A long long day

We started the day by waking up at 4:30 to get here at Sick Kids by 6:00am. Once here Jadon got another bath with antiseptic soap and was changed into his hospital gown. He was ready for surgery by 7:30 but surgery wasn't ready for him. He was scheduled for second surgery so we had to kill time until around 1:00om. The challenge was that Jason could not have any solids since midnight the night before. Hornet he was wonderful. He enjoyed posing in the pay room on the cardiac floor (lots of new toys! ) and we walked around and around and around the hospital. Jason even fell asleep for over an hour. His SATs were better than we had seen then in a long time so he went in to surgery in good shape. .. which became very important later on.

Sara and I had lunch and walked around a bit and then went to the Ronald McDonald room where we each got a recliner in a quiet zone where we caught about an hours sleep. We then headed down to wait in the surgery waiting room. ..anticipating news by around 7:00. I know we say that no news is good news but... this was not the case.

Due to Jadon's heart being on the right side of his chest it took a little longer to get full access to the heart. The major part of the surgery went well but they noticed that one of Jadon's valves was leaking. They had to fix it and also then replace the valve from the pulmonary artery which they were not planning to do. This made the surgery much longer. About 9 hours in, the surgeon came out and told us that as a result Jadon's heart was weakened and he was put on an ECMO (a machine that does the work of the heart and lung). He had just been transferred to the ICU after 11 hours of surgery. The surgeon mentioned after the surgery that Jadon is doing a bit better than they anticipated given the challenges of the surgery and the emergency valve repairs. We will get to go see Jadon in a few more minutes now.